It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2016-03-01 23:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, jack penhaligon, marta flores |
Backdated: Sunshine and Jack
Who: Jack P and Sunshine F.
What: Aborted bartering of services
When: Some time back, pre-fog.
Warnings: Adult situation and swears.
Jack was a man much used to his own bloody company. The office levied over the bookstore was practically a monument to dissipated living and the motel room in the ugly, stained block of rooms for people passing through who had determined not to pass-exactly-through immediately, was anonymous save for the empties collected out front. And it was too easy to forget around other people, exactly the rules and parameters of his specific situation. There were bars for that. Not the relaxed expanse of a home setting. Better the ugly, nylon-crackle of sheets as they curled lovingly around his legs in the morning and set his hairs to static than sliding soundlessly into some form of intimacy. (Not that it was a risk: Jack was a calculation an underwriter would dream of).
But that wasn’t to say he wanted to avoid all trappings completely. Repose was a lonely town. It was perched on the edge of nothing, bridged from the city by roads that were burdened with snow and stretches of driving with nothing but the radio to interject. It was a lonely town, recognized by the local establishments catering to lonely men - and he’d sat through enough beers as girls twisted and turned just far enough away from the floor to be seductive instead of ordinary, sweat-stains and cheap nylon and far-away looks as they calculated shopping lists, or homework, or even the radio-hit lodged inside their heads, out of reach.
No thank you. He got good and loaded at the bar that was half-way house between burlesque - god knows what that meant - and Cat’s uncomfortably real environment where judgment was probably served along with a pint, and he made for the collection of trailers at the edge of the woods.
Sunshine's days often ran together. An unending line of customers and memories of the past. She drank in order to sleep, to fill the hours between the last man of one night and the first of the next. She did what she could in order to wake up the next day, and she did her best to ignore those moments when she figured that not waking up maybe wouldn't be the worst thing.
Her light was on, an incandescent glow from next to her dented metal door, the door that never closed quite right, at least locking, but letting a draft in at the top and bottom edges. The trailer itself was old, battered, surrounded by grass and growth that overtook its base. Inside, an old space heater chugged away in defiance of any firecode violations its exposed coils earned, keeping the small interior warm enough that she could lounge in a bra and panties, a thrifted satiny robe tied overtop and ending just past her ass, and tall, thick-knitted socks pulled over her knees and nearly to her thighs.
It was work hours, so she waited, watching a tv kept on mute while the radio played something low in the background.
The burnished light of people keeping company with other lonely sods, shone like beads of light knotted on a rope around the darkness. Jack didn’t know the line-up in the row of trailers: he knew one woman likely queened it over the rest and dished out work and charm to the sheriff’s office - god knows how the new sheriff was handling this little business venture.
But it had been months since appetite and stubborn resentment shifted the dial toward the opportune, and he was having trouble mustering the remnants of memory to fuse together the shape of a woman in darkness: laughter, the slice of creamy thigh in the slant of street-light from the window beyond and the face of his own girl, long enough to keep going. It was like artists, wasn’t it? Copying, until they had enough of the image to fashion it themselves. That, or stark loneliness roping his guts starkly enough to leave him spare, enough to consider toe-stepping toward danger. No. The arbitration of a woman’s fears, out on the ledge of a fledged relationship, was enough to salt that particular plot of earth and bury it deep. Just dull appetite, wetted from time rather than any particular lust.
He mustered, the smell of fresh liquor and stale cigarettes over the dull smell of clean cotton and cheap detergent as he lurched toward the first door in the middle distance. The hum of the radio slid past the gappy door, and greeted him, and god, that was depressing. Fucking to a harmony of late-night broadcasts. He knocked, poor excuse for a door and loitered, waiting to be shuffled away from the park by whoever the fuck ran this place and left its residents in shitty accommodations.
Sunshine looked at her door when the knock came, and immediately pushed herself up to answer it. The TV was turned off as she moved, remote left on top of the flat surface that functioned as a counter in her "kitchen". Moving through the small space took her through islands of temperature, hot near the near-vintage space heater, cold where the draft came around the door, chilly but warm enough in the little alcove of her bed. Especially since she was either sleeping beneath the covers or fucking on top of them.
The trailer did have a lock on the door, for all the good it would do if someone got it in their mind to break their way in. She had a feeling that was how the door got bent in the first place, someone a little too anxious to get to whatever girl occupied the trailer before her. No one had ever been that excited to get to Sunshine. But she still kept it locked, even during her work hours, so it gave a gritty hiss as she turned it back, lifting on the doorknob just enough so that the warped metal door didn't drag on the threshold.
She could smell the alcohol from where she stood, it though it came stale from the man standing there, it made her think of the few bottles she had stashed in a hidden cabinet inside (the better to keep customers from walking off with them). A drink would be nice, but not until she was done for the night. That was one line that she still drew for herself - if she was working, she was sober.
At least the guy wasn't falling down from it. Or covered in vomit. Or puking right there on her doorstep. He was calm at the moment, too, which was a good way to start. And he didn't reek of body odor that she could smell at a distance. Each one was something she'd had to deal with in the past. Not even the distant past. And, in the yellow light of the bulb next to the door and the little that spilled from inside, she could tell that he wasn't visually repulsive. She couldn't yet judge what sort of man he was, but she'd deal with it.
"Hey, handsome. Did the bosslady send you my way?" She didn't smile much anymore, but her mouth curved just enough to fool everyone when she was working. It helped that her robe was only tied loosely, and from where he stood just a few steps down from her door, he was already getting a glimpse of panties and the lacy edge of her bra. Most men didn't try to analyze a whore's smile when they had better things to look at.
Jack had never been particularly analytical. He had run on instinct for so long that when it yawned open the chasm underneath him, when instinct undid him as easily as if it had been waiting with the knife for years - cold calculation was hard to learn but it was a tight-rope over difficult waters. Now his eyes slid from the girl - woman? More girl than anything else in that middle distance between youth and self-possession that he couldn’t calculate exactly in the little light - and the pretence of a smile to the froth of artificial lace that matched at her breast.
He could hold his liquor, particularly when he didn’t drink to black-out excess regardless, but he was human. He smiled, and his own was warmer than hers, mellowed care-of the three glasses of warm, sharp and expensive drunk on the way over. “Can’t say I stopped to ask. I’ve never liked being told what to do.” He was grateful that despite the trailer showing signs for wear, she didn’t look dessicated by the work: hypocritical, given his visit, but the thought of frank disgust or lack of interest in a woman who was paid to give it to him was less inspiring than staying home.
It was acting when she kept that smile pasted on, the eye-roll that came next was gentle instead of the annoyance in her mind. It was a facade that she'd created when she danced onstage and it had only gotten better, more convincing, when she started fucking for cash. "Well I'll take care of it then. But we're going to have to get you to lay the cash down first. You've gotta pay for what you want." She reached out a hand to beckon to him before she turned just enough to step back inside the trailer. She never quite turned her back to him, and the movement shifted the short robe against her thigh, revealing the inked Ganesh that watched the world from her skin.
Inside again, waiting for him to enter and close the door behind him, she made her way back through the temperature zones of her trailer, finally sitting on the edge of her mattress and bracing her hands behind her as she leaned back. It was a casually seductive pose, legs crossed and bare, robe slipping to expose a shoulder, nipples hard from the cold of standing at the door and visible through the thin material of robe and bra. She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "So what're you thinking of tonight? You want me to suck you off? Wanna fuck me?" That eyebrow quirked at him, the act still holding strong. "Wanna do something more than just that? You tell me and I'll tell you what it costs."
Cash upfront didn’t bother Jack. It was a transaction, and it made perfect sense given the environs and the sale involving what could not be taken back if payment wasn’t received. He had unfolded a handful of bills from a worn leather wallet: two hundred, and if that wasn’t enough then prices in Repose were steeper than he remembered the ones in Shanghai being, granted he’d been shit-faced and part of a group of very loud men at the time. He dropped the bills onto the side gracelessly, and he shut the door of the trailer behind him on the cold night air. When he turned around, she had arranged herself into provocation. Oh yes, it was casual but equally it was calculated and the proximity of the pose and the youth and the ruthlessness of her expression was a turn-off rather than an easy, ‘press button here’ start to the libido.
Jack ran a palm over the hasp of stubble, looked at her blankly. “There’s two hundred on the side. Why the elephant?” He was looking at the inked thigh, a slice of flesh that made her a woman instead of barely a step up from miserable masturbation in a hotel room. He thought about the offer of options, bleak in the circumstances. Being sucked off, he was supposed to what? Close his eyes and blot out the hum of the radio, the stark scarcity of the trailer?
Two hundred was enough for everything except putting violent bruises on her skin or stealing her breath with a hand around her throat. So she nodded as she sat up straighter again, but her eyes didn't leave him. "Unless you're wanting something special, that's enough." She had faith in this one to know what special meant in this instance. Her hands went to the silky belt of her robe as she stood, but his question made her stop and look up, the confusion an obvious flicker across her face before she hammered it back down again into a mild smile-like-thing.
"Elephant?" It was a question that worried her, because it made no sense to her. And if he started rambling about seeing elephants, if he revealed himself to be one of the crazy ones, so far gone that he was hallucinating, she wasn't sure if she'd be able to get past him to get out of her trailer and over to the next one.
Jack knew entirely what ‘special’ meant, thanks very bloody much. He wasn’t that man. He hadn’t ever been that man, no matter what line he’d walked when he was young, rich and stupid. He’d fucked a line across the world and he had been high or drunk doing it but he didn’t get hard watching a woman choke, or splutter, from pain. No, he had the sad virtue of wanting one willing, preferably eager. Paying for it, he didn’t fool himself you acquired willingness, interest or eagerness for a couple of Benjamin Franklins but he watched confusion flare on her face and burn away some of the plastic amiability. Good. Relief curdled beneath the booze. There was something intensely dislikable (oh, so perfectly and sordidly true about it too) about a woman who acted exactly as if you’d bought and paid for her temporarily.
The flesh-trade could be ugly. He didn’t begin to ruminate on why she was there; it was enough that she was. Nor did Jack believe in saviors, god-complexes or wish to provide anyone’s comfort. It was enough to glut a little of his own. “Elephant.” She stared at him blankly, he reached out. His hand slid into the part of the flimsy robe without hesitation, cold fingertips to the spread of ink, the Indian god pricked out on the canvas of her thigh.
“That one.” Thumb firmly against the long curl of trunk. Her skin was warm; he’d half worried she would have felt like plastic.
She blinked at the repetition regarding the 'elephant', and still didn't understand until he reached out to touch her thigh. His hand was cold, and her eyes narrowed into the slightest wince at it. Another one of those subtle expressions that were so often overlooked by her customers for one reason or another. She actually looked down at where his hand met her leg, like she'd forgotten, somewhere along the line, what she had inked on her skin. It was true that she so often tried to put all the memories of the past out of her mind, and that included the pictures pricked out by inky needles. Sometimes the johns liked to comment on them or make them a part of it. Tattoo fetishists that got off on thinking about a girl like her going under the needle. But no one, in the months she'd been working, had asked about any of them. And so her answer came without thought, even though she immediately felt like she'd given too much of herself away once it was out.
"It's Ganesh. Not an elephant."
The words hung for a moment, awkward in a way that never earned a girl extra cash, and she shook her head, faux-smile returning. "That's not why you came though, yeah? Just some fucking ink. I can cover it up if you want."
Jack was too stand-up drunk to recognize a split-second of bodily autonomy asserting itself, but he saw the narrowing of eyes, and hell, anything was better than a smile that slid like water-resistant plastic. “Why?” Bewilderment. Were those who rolled through Repose particularly picky? Refined tastes that excluded Indian gods? He’d done a stint in Mumbai, the clothes trade. It hadn’t been arms in the desert, it had been comparative luxury. He remembered cows stubbornly ignoring swerving traffic, dust, noise and color.
“Why do you have Ganesh there?” His weight sagged on knees and Jack sat abruptly, on the end of the bed she had arranged herself out on in a deliberation that reminded him of expensive, exclusive sushi dinners eaten with men too rich to think of something original, elbows on knees. Closer-to, the smell of whiskey was heavier and beneath it was coffee, the cigarettes again.
His hand lingered on her thigh, but she was able to let it be there for a few long moments as his eyes continued to rove over her, slow thoughts turning behind his eyes. The single word of question received only another raising of eyebrows, needing more explanation before she could answer. And by the time she got that explanation, she'd had the opportunity to slip back away from the personal.
"Because it was a good area of skin, and it was still blank." She laid her hand over his, palm warm but fingers icy, and guided his hand higher, encouraging the touch. It wasn't turning her on, not exactly, not mentally, but it would help get her body going a little more. Up along the outside of her thigh, up to her hip and the rough texture of lace over curve of feminine bone and flesh. The touch moved away when he sat suddenly, but at least he was on the bed. Weak legs were something she could deal with, especially if he was inclined to sit back and let her do most of the work.
He was hunched over, elbows to his knees, and that wouldn't work for her. She twisted closer, the alcohol-cigarette smell of him far from the worst she'd dealt with, a line of warmth against the side of his body. "Come on," it came as a whisper as she reached over to press at his shoulder, urging him out of the curve of his spine, upright, enough for her to move more, oddly graceful, and plant a knee (thick socks just long enough to cover up over them) on either side of his hips, holding herself up until she so-slowly let her weight rest on his thighs, hands on both his shoulders for a moment. "Let me take care of you for a while, yeah?" It was just as quiet as her hands moved to the knot of her robe's sash, untying it and letting it slip off both shoulders, revealing more ink: crest of shoulder, inner wrist, over mountains and valleys of her ribcage and in the shadowed hollow below her breastbone. No color anywhere, just black ink stark on the snowdrift of her skin.
The robe slid, cheap fabric pooling at her elbows and eddied over her arms. She wasn’t bloody kidding, it was still blank. She wore ink like she had been written on, like she’d given herself a map to chart her history or perhaps the things she wanted, the things she liked. She was a warm weight on the flat of his thighs but it was impatience that had put her there: hers, not his. It was bloody-mindedness that had sent him to the park at the edge of the town, and it wasn’t warm-wet willingness but the company that didn’t require any facet of pretending to be anything other than blisteringly lonely (which Jack was not stupid enough to believe was lacking) but nor required any emotional investment that loaded the interaction with risk. He was, therefore, irritatingly patient.
“That doesn’t explain why it was Ganesh,” he persisted and he touched the spread of black ink that spanned her chest. Black, not color. Why? He wore no permanent marks of what he’d lived, partly because permanency was best avoided if you were known for making stupid decisions. He’d done enough that was permanent without carrying it around on his arms.
He was still talking, still asking questions, and she realized that he was going to be chatty. Usually the chatty ones wanted to talk about themselves, just requiring that she listen, that she be there to make some sort of interested sound from time to time. But he was asking, and that was an entirely different beast to handle. She didn't get mad, but she did take a moment to figure out how to answer his questions in ways that didn't reveal too much about herself.
With questions about her tattoos, something so personal, it was hard.
She slid her hands into his jacket, pushed them up to his shoulders as she did her best to work it off (a hint of pretended smile on her face the entire time). She wasn't rushing it, just progressing it. "I like elephants. And his chubby belly." She didn't look at him while she said it, gaze just a little too wide of center to meet his eyes. But close enough that she could focus on her hand at his shoulder, pushing away coat until shirt was left behind. She didn't look at him, but her tone was light. Maybe, if he was drunk enough, he'd believe the lie of a whore with an empty brain.
Fat chance, he didn’t. She would have had more like with the drunk that usually propped up the far end of the bar Jack sat at. He was heavy-lidded lechery rather than Jack’s casual profanity and he never said more than three words an hour, five words at a push. Jack had always been a verbose asshole when it came to women, and he wasn’t interested (yet) in her rack so much as the ink that edged her rib-cage. She smiled like she grimaced, and he leaned back, one hand spread on the bed behind his own hip to ease his weight apart from hers. He looked at her, bleared-red eyes and scruff and said conversationally, “Are you trying to rush me? An elephant isn’t an Indian god. Hindu, isn’t he? What about the rest?”
An expression crossed her face when he leaned back again, and it wasn't all positive. It was a flash of annoyance, confusion at the "script" taking a turn off the road from what she was used to. He seemed entirely uninterested in what people usually arrived at her trailer for, and she couldn't stop the tired sigh that slipped out. "Fuck." Some of her pseudo-sweetness had slipped away, leaving her as customers so rarely saw her. "Seriously? This is how you want to fucking do this?"
Ah, there. Satisfaction briefly flitted across grizzled jaw and Jack looked momentarily more alive than the wrung-out drunk with too much time and a skinful of too much liquor to know how to play with a woman on his lap. She was pissed, and it was a momentary reminder that he couldn’t pay for companionship that actually bloody liked him. It was easier to live with, this way. Less painfully pretend.
“Probably.” He smiled at her, teeth and tired eyes and he lifted his hand away from the heated flat of her skin. “You don’t want to talk about Ganesh. Tell me about something else.”
Her weight rested heavier on his knees for a moment before she tipped herself off to the side again, vacating his lap in a tumble of legs (pale skin, ink, and thick thigh-highs). She tucked her one leg up close to her body, letting her sit close to his hip, but her other leg (the one with the tattoo of Ganesh) stayed hooked over his lap to hold him there - a flesh restraint. She turned it so that he could see the ink better, hoping to maybe still tempt him with it and with the warmth of her inner thigh pressed to the material of his pants.
"Ganesh is about beginnings. He removes obstacles from the path. He oversees all sorts of knowledge and arts." Her voice was different when she was 'lecturing' on a topic - softer and with less sharpness than it usually held. "Wisdom…"
He was used to a woman sat astride his lap: the last woman who’d done it had been bare knees on the fold of a newspaper, copper-red hair stranded over cotton shirt and the smell of warm coffee and fresh cigarette smoke on the exhale as she’d laughed into his face. Ink and cool skin and thigh-highs, they were novel. It wasn’t precisely a trick out of his particular book of turn-ons, but he imagined it would work: it would for most men. “Wisdom.” He heard the bell-ring of her voice chime quieter, moderated. Less plastic, less of the bored shopgirl plying a particular kind of trade.
“What kind of obstacles?”
She looked over at his question and her eyebrows were already inching up. "All kinds of obstacles." She said it as if it should be obvious. "Whatever's in the way, he's supposed to help remove it." Her mouth twisted into something that was perhaps meant to be a smile. It wasn't very convincing, even to a mind likely slowed by alcohol. "I don't think it works for white girl whores in the middle of nowhere, but at one point I liked the thought."
Jack didn’t think Indian gods quibbled the ‘whore’ so much as the ‘white girl, Western culture’ point, but the less she pressed the point - or the lackthereof, on his lap - the less he felt like tipping her off and leaving her and the cash to her evening. No doubt he’d be replaced in due course with someone far easier to accommodate. She was still smiling like he had her arm twisted behind her back, but again - presumably that worked when you weren’t necessarily looking for anything but tokenism.
Rather than sink into the melancholic depression that threatened to loom and consume all hope of getting some semblance of enjoyment out of the evening however faked, Jack tuned into the question. “And you had obstacles before the change in job description,” he pressed, one hand on the slope of her thigh. Arguably, because it was a nice thigh. Arguably, to keep her from sliding about now he had a good line of questioning that distracted him from the vague impression that fucking her would be borderline on consensual.
“What about this one?” He touched the ink at her breastbone, and it was too prosaic to be a gesture that indicated a particular turn-on.
One eyebrow arched ever-so-expressively upwards at the question, there solidly before she could could chase it back down into something more pleasant. Her name may have been given to her ironically - wouldn't it be funny to call her Sunshine when she was the opposite? - but she could still do her best to be pleasant when there were johns in her trailer. Unless they were the type to want something harsher. Then she could fight back and spit and hiss as well as any kicked street animal. It was marketing, in a way. Not that she would have realized or put it that way. But for the moment, that eyebrow was up, accompanied by an attitude that couldn't quite be quashed. "Everyone I've ever known has had obstacles." She said it like it was obvious. Like he shouldn't even be asking such a question.
The touch to her breastbone, the ink in the hollow below it, was almost too intimate for her to deal with, but she barely reacted (though a part of her wanted to rear back and glare at the gentleness). She glanced down, as if she had to be reminded of the shapes she saw there daily. "That's a lotus." She again said it like it was obvious, that the question shouldn't even have to be asked, but since talking about her ink seemed to be what he wanted to pay for, and since it was out there for public display, she didn't feel like she had much choice in revealing more than she usually did. "Beauty and keeping from being too tied to any one thing."
Jack knew a number of obstacles that had strewn his path. But nothing that had inspired ink on skin to mark it. The old itch, the one that lay deep beneath the dermis and occasionally rolled over to say, ‘here, son, look harder’ gave an experimental stretch but she was one woman, half-naked on his lap and the old guilt tamped down the itch with a practiced hand. He didn’t know Sunshine marketed herself on plastic sweetness and fighting back. He didn’t know her name was Sunshine.
“I can see it’s a bloody lotus,” he said entirely affably, possibly the warm bleed of liquid in his belly to mollify the words. “But I wanted to know what it meant.” His hand rooted her on his lap by virtue of her knee and the warmth of the trailer had begun to wrap itself around his bones. “What do you mean, tied to any one thing?” He blinked at her. Jack’s eyes were blue, a very pale color suited to glass rather than a suggestion of true depth of color. They were bloodshot now and the staining underneath suggested sleeplessness, as did the crawled shadow up his jaw. He wore a shirt that had been expensive once, loose at the throat. He had pale eyelashes, and the requirement to look up meant looking through them, fingers on her breastbone warm and dry.
“What’s your name?”
Sunshine's leg hooked a little tighter over the man's lap, holding them both steady even as those hints of her true (much less 'sunshiney') parts of her personality shone through. Her inner thigh was soft where it rested, skin slipping naked and waxed-smooth over the material of his pants. It was the sort of shift that, with any other customer, would be an invitation to touch. But she was learning that it wouldn't work the same on him. And that was frustrating. She didn't usually charge by the time, but by the service. She was beginning to wonder if she could alter it for this particular customer.
"If you can see that, why did you ask?" Her tone was light enough, the sort of tease that some men liked (and that some men didn't like, and it was hard to know which until a hit was connecting to bruise). She'd already told him the meaning, and at another question, she went on. It had been too long since she talked about anything like this, but she did her best to pull out those old memories and dust them off. "Lotuses, water lilies, they grow in water, but they rise to the top. Away from all the shit at the bottom of the pond. They don't get tangled up in that or in anything else. They can float on their own." Her gaze was too intense on his, a challenge that shouldn't have been issued that way. One she knew better than to make, when the john wasn't paying for the pleasure of slapping her around when she got to be too much.
She finally cut that gaze, glancing over at her own wall. There was a hook near the door, and hanging from it was a wall plaque from the 70s - "You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine…". She'd found it in a thrift store on her journey to Repose, after some asshole trucker had taken offense to her attitude, and he hadn't been the first. (Well aren't you just a fucking ray of sunshine?) He hadn't complained about her payment for hitching a ride in the cab of his truck, though he hadn't been nice about it - she hadn't been able to talk for two days after. But she'd seen the plaque the next week, as she was still a little croaky, and had bought in on the spot. Carried it with her the rest of the way and hung it up when she'd finally landed in Repose. She gave it a meaningful glance and a little nod of her head. And hoped the man pinned under her thigh was quick enough to get it.
He wasn’t going to hit her. The thought hadn’t crossed his mind: Jack preferred his women mouthy, bossy and laughing rather than meekly pliant and he showed no sign of an inclination toward the latter rather than the former. But the little shantytown of trailers beyond the edge of the town’s real lighting system had its own concerns and its own expectations. One halfway drunk man on a bed didn’t do much to shift those.
“So that’s you, too.” Jack didn’t think this was a particularly deep insight of his own, given the dark ‘what of it?’ expression on the woman’s face. “So you want to rise up, or you’ve risen?” He had assessed he was walking a thin, albeit not very blue, line between what was acceptable within the walls and what was not but until such time as she swung her legs back across his lap and threw him out into the gasp of a cold night, he was placing bets on skirting it.
But dutifully he followed her line of sight. Kitschy plaques were not Jack’s favorite line in decor, this one was no less pleasant. But Sunshine? He looked at her, and the plaque, “If that’s your moniker, God has a sense of humor,” he said with that flat smile again. Through the dregs of what passed for sobriety, he fumbled for the name. “Forums, weren’t you the woman with the drink?” He wasn’t sure what was polite with a woman who put herself about for cash, whether you were supposed to pretend that what was within the walls remained as such.
Sunshine's expression nearly radiated flat disbelief at him. "You really think this counts as risen up?" She sketched a loose gesture around at the trailer that surrounded them. "You've got a fucked up view of the world, if that's what you're thinking." A shake of her head and a silent judgement of his ability to understand real life.
Her eyes flattened at the mention of God. For all the ink on her body, she'd never been one to claim true belief in any one thing. Not when she was younger, and definitely not now. "God can go fuck himself if he's real." There was no smile in that statement, no tease in the blasphemy. She truly believed it, and in that moment there was no covering it. But then she shifted over to a lifted eyebrow, slight surprise in the shadows of the corners of her mouth. It sounded instantly familiar, and she knew exactly what he meant. But better to play dumb and stay safe. "Sorry, mister. I don't know what that's supposed to mean."
Jack contemplated all the ways a trailer park and a job along these lines could be considered ‘risen up’. There were a number of them, but they largely rested on a breathtakingly patronizing comparison to situations that belonged to other people and the woman on top of him (with her knee dangerously close to a part of his body he valued) looked angry enough to blister paint. “Duly noted,” he drawled, looking around the sketched trailer. “So it’s aspirational, the lotus.”
As was, by all appearances, the Ganesh. The smile faded and slid somewhat south when she vented spleen in God’s name with an enthusiasm that spoke both of impassioned hurt and of youthful anger. Most people Jack remembered giving up believing in God did so and ceased to care about him, other than a fiction they had been told as children. Sunshine - in this miserable little trailer, with a sales-pitch that probably rested on her not being as angry as she was - was too vitriolic about it to have let go of it as nothing but a fairy-story.
And there was nobody else called bloody Sunshine in town. Decision made, Jack patted her thigh regretfully, and levied her leg up over his lap and released himself. “Goodnight.”
A surprising bit of honest: "A reminder. At least it was supposed to be." She didn't say how more than one of her tattoos would be either removed or altered if she had the extra spending money. She didn't know what she would change them to though, and that was part of the reason they remained as they were.
And just as she was possibly starting to settle into accepting that it would only be conversation with this guy, he pushed her away and stood up. And that? Wasn't in the usual script of things, even for the talkers. It was sudden and abrupt, and after starting to grow accustomed to the questions and the conversation, the frown that crossed her face was obvious. And dark. "Fine." Sharp and cutting, the word sliced out and sounded anything but fine. She grabbed her robe, slipping it back on again as she pushed past him, synthetic silk and sharp elbows (neither of which actually made contact with him). Sash tied tightly, she grabbed the money from where he'd left it and reached in to shove it into his pocket before turning to open the door, holding it open as the chill outside stole all of the spaceheater's warmth from the trailer. "See ya." Equally sharp, gone was any softness she'd had during their discussion.
The cold was abrupt, but Jack reached into the pocket she’d stuffed full of notes, and handed back at least half - and if she didn’t take them, he dropped them, because God alone knew he’d taken up the time of a couple of real punters who wouldn’t ask half a dozen searching questions.
“Good night, Sunshine.” And he shrugged his coat back up his shoulders again, and turned away, still half-cut but settled on solitude, at least, for an evening.